Hulse studied at Cooper Union College in New York City (B.S., 1970) and earned a Ph.D. degree in physics (1975) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was a graduate student under Taylor. Using the large radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, they discovered dozens of pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit rapid, regular bursts of radio waves. Irregularities in the radio emissions of the pulsarPSR 1913 + 16 led them to deduce that the pulsar had a companion neutron star with which it was locked in a tight orbit. This discovery was made by Taylor and Hulse in 1974.

PSR 1913 + 16 proved doubly important because it provided the first means of detecting gravity waves. The two stars’ enormous interacting gravitational fields were affecting the regularity of the radio pulses, and by timing these and analyzing their variations, Taylor and Hulse found that the stars were rotating ever faster around each other in an increasingly tight orbit. This orbital decay is presumed to occur because the system is losing energy in the form of gravity waves. This finding, as reported by Taylor and Hulse in 1978, afforded the first experimental evidence for the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity.

In 1977 Hulse changed fields from astrophysics to plasma physics and joined the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. There he conducted research associated with the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, an experimental nuclear-fusion facility.

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